West outside my window so
the sunrise, what I see of it, is indirect,

and at its best, I’d say, this time of year,
my favorite, when the trees

are undistracted into flourishing.
The topmost branches, bare in all their

glory, turning radiant with welcome and
the one tree farther, a farm away,

lit up above the scrublands as if
chosen, as we are,

for a blessing we don’t deserve.
         •
But how do you manage for faith, she said
(our coffees had come in discardable cups),

and in her eyes and in the still un-
scumbled planes of her face (so young)

the question she’s too kind to ask: and how
have you let it come to this?

I am trying to write an essay, I said, about form.
         •
Already our sorry remnant of snow
is giving up, which means the roads

will be wretched again, they love to return
to mud. The Romans, whatever you think

of them, did this better. Ditched
and cambered, layered roadbed five

feet deep. Lime from the likewise
layered rock that once was coral and algae

and shell, ash that was once a volcano. I’ll
confess the warmer weather has its virtues too.
         •
The butterflies, for instance. The ones
in the news. Indigo at the midline, dustings

of silver on the double wing, both fore-
and hind: the chalkhill blue.

We love them for their beauty but the ants,
indifferent to beauty for all we know, at least

as we construe it, love to milk
their honeyed larvae. We’ll feed

on your darlings while they’re other-
wise defenseless, guard the cells we’ve

built for them underground, and, when
they’re ready,

let them go. Chalk because their one food
grows on chalky soil.
         •
Trial and error, wit and will. And conscripts
by the thousands for the labor and the

laying out. But how
in the history of accident had

humanity come upon quicklime?
Which, added to concrete, means

that something not in nature can, like nature,
heal. The science is quite beyond me, and

the Romans will have thought about it
otherwise, not having the advantage of

the spectroscope. The more we know the
more we know the world’s a wonder. We’re

apprenticed, every one of us, to stone.